The Schoolmarm

Awake too early this morning, I lay reflecting on Leslie Fiedler's animadversion against Montana; specifically on the utter wrongness of his take on the Schoolmarm, whose historical and on-going cultural importance he seems to recognize, but whom he cannot dissociate from the similarly female, WASP Culture-Nazis that oppressed him as a nasty Yid-kid street urchin in Newark, New Jersey.  His saying, however hyperbolically, that the Schoolmarm married into Frontier Society, thus driving out the Honest Whore who'd arrived before her--though it may have happened in penny-dreadful Western Novels (I couldn't say; I've never read one)--is pure, malicious bunkum.  I know.

The Schoolmarm--who appeared throughout the Far West after the Civil War, bringing to, and enforcing upon, the isolated children of the Far West, Standard American (WASP, Puritan, New England, and, incidentally, Transcendentalist) Civilization, and the Standard (Western New England) American English dialect--was also summoned then, out of her native Western New England, by my own great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers (sexual equality arrived early in the Far West), to the Palouse Country of my birth, in Southeastern Washington State, to civilize and educate their sons and daughters, my grandfathers and grandmothers.  Her sway was absolute, as were the standards and values of the education she imparted:  Fortunately, due largely to the Transcendentalist Philosophy which imbued all of New England society at that time, her own education (though even a Post-Deconstructionist might think it narrowly literary) was probably the best in the world then available to women.  And when the children under her tutelage had passed through the standard eight grades of her one-room school, every one of them--including those that today would be considered hopelessly retarded--would have thoroughly mastered the basic skills of a literate society:  They could read (and they would have been exposed to the standard classics of English literature), write and cipher legibly--and they spoke, without regional or dialectal impurity (being isolated), Standard American English with a Western New England inflection. Sapir and Whorf, Pinker and Chomsky, theories of language acquisition and the cultural implications of language, were far in the future--We now, more or less consciously, know that Language is what is spoken by children, and that Culture is what is conveyed by Language--but, whether instinctually or under the aegis of Divine (Transcendental) Inspiration, the Schoolmarm created, from the ground up, in my grandparents, the Individualist, crypto-Transcendentalist, Far Western Civilization inherited by my parents and, eventually, by me.  By the early 20th Century, when schools were consolidated in the Far West and regularly subsidized with local taxes, the Schoolmarm's work was done, and she, not really ever having been much interested in sex or marriage with men, quietly retired with the female companion she had lived with all along.  How vile, how gratuitous, how Freudian and Joycean is the speculation that they were Lesbians.